Traffic from bots will surpass traffic from humans by 2027, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in an interview at SXSW this week. He said the rapid growth of generative AI is causing bots to visit far more websites than humans.
A human might visit 5 sites to buy a camera, but an AI agent can visit up to 5,000 sites to answer a single user query. Before the era of generative AI, bots accounted for only 20% of traffic on the internet. This situation is set to get even worse with the use of robots.txt by many sites to prevent content from being picked up by AI.
Last year, Wikipedia reported that 65% of the high traffic on their site was from bots that steal page data to train artificial intelligence (AI). What’s even more troubling is that this traffic usage is extraordinary even though only 35% of the site’s visitors are bots. It puts a strain on web browsers to the point where regular users can’t access the site when they need to.
